Here's the description in the updated programme:
One morning, Karen (Shirley Henderson), an embattled single mom, preps her four very small children for school. Is she widowed, divorced or abandoned? No—her husband (John Simm) is doing a five-year stretch in prison. Michael Winterbottom’s patient observational style depicts Karen’s efforts to protect her kids, fend off loneliness and simply survive between the brief, intense, sexually charged moments when she visits her husband. Winterbottom’s 20th completed feature in the last 15 years isn’t a traditional socially conscious issue film about the “problem” of prisoners and their families. As its title suggests, it is more a dispassionate ironic hymn to the “dailiness” of marriage and the terrors and joys of raising kids. Winterbottom went all out to make this true to life, casting four real siblings and, by filming in two-week stints over a five-year period, watching them grow in front of the camera. –LG (U.K., 2012, 120m) In person: Michael Winterbottom, Shirley Henderson, Shaun, Robert, Stephanie and Katrina Kirk

Four children repeatedly brush their teeth, eat their cereal and visit their incarcerated dad in Michael Winterbottom's "Everyday," a fitfully engaging attempt by the ever-experimental director to challenge the way cinema deals with stories of duration by shooting in sequence over a span of five years. Commissioned by Film4 as a look at the British prison system, Winterbottom's verite-style treatment yields something resembling the deleted-scenes reel from a more sensational treatment of the same subject, emphasizing routine over landmark events. Bound for TV in its native U.K., pic could leverage curiosity for a small domestic VOD deal.

Like American counterpart Steven Soderbergh, Winterbottom is one of those directors seemingly bored by the limitations of conventional narrative, twisting and bending the rules in new ways every time at bat. For obvious reasons, such outside-the-box projects appeal to film fans eager to see how certain stories hold up to playful manipulation, though the results have a tendency to confound unsuspecting auds.

Considered within the context of other prison films, "Everyday" lacks the cautionary cliches we've come to expect from the genre: There's no dropping of soap, no evil warden or attempted escapes. Instead, Winterbottom's vision (co-written with Laurence Coriat) conveys the tedium of confinement and the sheer volume of experience missed when a man finds himself separated from his family for five years. A more effective way to convey the same point might have been to tell the story strictly from Ian's perspective (John Simm plays the jailed patriarch), though such subjectivity doesn't gel with the pic's free-ranging fly-on-the-wall approach.

Instead, big-hearted Scottish actress Shirley Henderson gets the greater share of screentime as Karen, overwhelmed trying to care for the couple's four children while also working for tips at the local pub, where an opportunistic stranger (Darren Tighe) appeals to her loneliness. However difficult life was before Ian was arrested, it's downright daunting now as Karen tries to manage everything on her own, while still leaving time to commute by bus, train or taxi to the prison for visiting hours.

Clearly, it's all too much for one woman to handle: Karen's disapproving mother (Valerie Lilley) makes a begrudging babysitter, too distracted to notice when the boys start to play with dad's rifle, and the kids desperately need a father's influence at home, as suggested by the regular skirmishes they get into at school. "Everyday" communicates each of these points obliquely, expecting thinking auds to extrapolate how Ian's absence creates such challenges.

A bit more explanation would have gone a long way, however, and it's easy to get confused about what we're seeing. For instance, when Karen finally collects Ian from prison, one can't possibly know that he's only been released on a day pass until he returns a few hours later, having gotten little time to enjoy much more than a hasty shag with Karen and a group hug with the kids.

"Everyday" deliberately omits any direct mention of Ian's crime (though at one point, his sentence is extended when guards find him in possession of a small amount of drugs). Still, the implied message is more effective than the moral comeuppances once meted out by Hollywood's Hays Code: Whatever the crime, it's not worth it.

As the years go by and the kids grow -- perhaps the only real benefit of Winterbottom's approach -- time begins to run together, making it all too easy for the mind to wander. Occasional musical interludes lend the proceedings a much-needed meditative vibe, though as sublime as Michael Nyman's sparse score proves, there's no denying that everything the film has to say might have been conveyed just as effectively by a single, well-chosen country song.

John Simm talks about his new role in Michael Winterbottom’s brilliant film Everyday, and why he thinks people don’t notice him

The screenwriter Paul Abbott once told John Simm that he would never be considered a big star because, on screen, he is chronically unshowy. It was meant as a compliment. “Bit double-edged though, innit?” Simm frowns. “He said it doesn’t seem like I’m trying very hard. Like I’m not acting. So people don’t notice me and think, ‘Oh, we should give him loads of plaudits’.” A Manchester United fan, he reaches for an appropriate analogy: he is the quiet, disciplined, unselfish midfielder of the team. “Nicky Butt!” he decides with a glee that fades into wistful resignation. “Sometimes I’d rather be Paul Scholes.”

We are in the kitchen of Simm’s Edwardian home, drinking lots of tea, watching the drizzle set in over Muswell Hill, North London. He didn’t have to do the school run this morning so is still a little groggy from a lie-in, and curses when the family cats get under his feet. From interviews he has given, he says, it is possible that we have come to regard him as something of a grump, someone cynical about the acting profession and the manoeuvrings required to get ahead within it. “I could be a bit mouthy back then,” the 42-year-old explains a little sheepishly.

He has talked often about the time he went over to Hollywood after the success he enjoyed here in 2003 with the political thriller State of Play (written by Abbott), only to fly straight home when it became apparent that networking and sycophancy would be the prerequisite skills. Over the years he’s also angsted a little about being famous, about being recognised on the street. He wishes he hadn’t: “It doesn’t come across well. It looks like I’m moaning. I’m not. It just took me a while to get used to.”

Today, in Britain at least, we are well used to Simm. Since his breakthrough role as the gambler Danny Kavanagh in Jimmy McGovern’s brilliant Nineties drama The Lakes, he has excelled in the portrayal of flawed or compromised men often caught up in situations spiralling beyond their control. His two Bafta nominations came for Life on Mars (in which he played a modern police detective transported back to 1973) and Exile (in which he was a disgraced journalist having to contend with his father’s Alzheimer’s while attempting to uncover his own past). If it’s moral ambivalence you’re after, Simm is your man.

His latest role fits the pattern. In Michael Winterbottom’s Everyday he plays Ian, a man serving jail time while his wife (Shirley Henderson) and four young children continue with their lives in rural Norfolk. The film is a remarkable project, filmed in real time over a five-year period. We see his children slowly grow, Simm’s face subtly age as the seasons pass, all shot in an intimate documentary style (albeit with a Michael Nyman score). The result is moving, tender and raw, a warts-and-all study of childhood, family, loneliness and love. The kids are particularly captivating: the fact that they are not actors but actual siblings from Norfolk — Shaun, Robert, Stephanie and Katrina Kirk — only adds to the sense that you are watching something skirting a line between fact and fiction. Their performances were unscripted and their real-life family home was used as their home in the film. When they sing in school assembly, they really are singing in their school assembly.

And it is the children’s vivid freedom, tearing around the playground or yomping through woodland, that contrasts with Simm’s dull, stuffy captivity. Christmasses — four of them — are a particular focus of the film, the seasonal touch only adding to an already high lump-in-throat factor. The whole endeavour is quietly brilliant, easily one of the best British films of the past few years.
Still, the experience of actually getting the thing made was bizarre, Simm says. “I’d come back from six months filming something abroad and get this call from Michael saying I had to come and spend two weeks at a prison in Norwich. I’d think, ‘You’re kidding me! I’d forgotten all about that,’ ” he says, as if it were a parents’ evening he’d overloo ked. “It was like me and Shirley were having this weird affair for five years. Meeting and pretending we were married and kissing these strange kids.”

In real life, Simm is married to the actor Kate Magowan. They appeared together in 2002 in 24 Hour Party People, also directed by Winterbottom, a fellow Lancastrian with whom Simm had previously worked on Wonderland— like Everyday, a work of social realism. “I always joke with [Winterbottom] that whenever he does his big-budget American films he never rings me. But when he does ones where you have to get changed in the car park and bring your own lunch, it’s always ... ‘Right, where’s John?’ ”

He says that during filming of Everyday Winterbottom wouldn’t tell him what was going to happen next or, when he was in prison, what storylines his “family” was acting out. “I was actually kind of worried that not much seemed to be going on,” he says, explaining that, for the first few years of filming, he was mostly just in cells or prison visiting rooms. “But what a fool am I to doubt Michael Winterbottom. Plus it got a bit easier when I went on day release and could spend more time with Shirley and the kids.”

He says that he did a bit of improvisational work with some of the other inmates. Scary blokes? “Not really. It was mostly guys who were about to be released. ”

He talks about ambition. Over the past few years he’s seen the careers of a number of former co-stars suddenly “go stratospheric. “Simon Pegg ... James McAvoy ... [Michael] Fassbender ... they’ve all gone ‘whoosh!’,” he says, making sharp skyrocketing motions with his hand. He raises his mug to them all. There was a time when he’d have been seriously jealous — “there’s a period in your twenties when you think you’re going to take on the world. You’re thinking, ‘Why aren’t I Gary Oldman yet?’ ”. Even today, he’ll sometimes see a particular piece of casting and think, “For f**** sake. How did they get that? How come he’s a multi multi multimillionaire? But it’s all relative. I can’t really be envious of anyone.”

He says he wouldn’t mind doing a bit more comedy before too long. He’s also done a spot of Pinter and a bit of Chekhov in the past and would like to give them another crack if the chance comes up. He’s getting older but, because he’s a man, he knows that this isn’t going to restrict the roles he can play. If anything he reckons there will be more out there for him. You can sort of see it. And that’s the good thing about Simm: while he may not be showy enough for Hollywood, as an actor, he still backs himself completely. No false thesp modesty here. “It’s like when people describe me as a ‘TV actor’,” he grimaces. “What the hell does that mean? If I’d been on Emmerdale for 45 years, well, yeah, maybe.”

He remembers a review of his Hamlet at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield which — sin of sins — suggested that he “hadn’t done his job properly”. It still sticks in his throat. “If I could have found the reviewer I would’ve smacked him in the face. Cheeky f***er.”
It’s a spiky interlude in a cheerful, thoughtful morning. The next day he will e-mail to say that he hopes it didn’t seem as though he was moaning too much. Not at all. He’s a good bloke, talented too. He might not be flashy and might not get the plaudits he deserves, but onscreen, I think we all notice him a lot more than he imagines. And how often can you say that about an actor?